Publish/subscribe comes to the Net - Tibco introduces publish and subscribe infrastructure to the Internet - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Jan, 1997 by George Lawton

Tibco Inc., one of the first middleware providers to bring a "publish-and-subscribe" infrastructure to the financial market, recently announced new products and alliances designed to bring this same technology to the Internet. This technology, says Tibco, represents a new paradigm for the Web, which has been based on a request-respond architecture. The publish-and-subscribe model, sometimes described as push computing, has been used by the financial market for years to deliver information throughout large trading houses who depend on sub-second response time.

At the heart of Tibco's strategy are alliances with key players in the industry. Perhaps the most important from an Internet perspective is the agreement with Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., to incorporate Tibco's technology into Cisco's Internet Operating System, found in the majority of high-end routers on the Internet. Says Cisco CTO Edward Kozel, "We are often asked if the Internet can continue to scale up. Our answer is that the history of the Internet is one of constant growth and constant innovation to compensate for that growth. Only through this and driving open standards in the market do we think we can provide better functionality."

Tibco and Cisco will work together to develop an open reference specification for publish-and-subscribe technology. Cisco plans to offer the spec as an option on its routers sometime in mid-1997.

Vivek Ranadive, Tibco CEO, says that the biggest problem facing the Internet is congestion. With the request-respond model primarily used on the Web, a response must be sent each time a person makes a request for a particular piece of information. With Tibco's infrastructure, information is broadcast out by publishers. A single copy is sent to each router in the network. The Tibco software running on each router splits the message into the minimum number of copies required to reach everyone who has subscribed to a particular subject. Consequently the publishing server is not overloaded with requests from different people asking for the same information.

To fortify its architecture, Tibco plans to roll out a variety of products during the first half of 1997. One of the most important is the Subject Naming Server, which will allow people to find new publications much in the way that domain name servers are used to resolve Web addresses.

Other products include the TIBnet SDK, which will enable developers to create their own applications; the TIBnet Proxy, which will provide security and subject name filtering for a network; the TIBnet engine, which will contain runtime packages for application deployment; and the TIBnet ISP Kit, a set of software components that will enable Internet Service Providers to support publish and subscribe over their networks.